The area that my family home is in is really a beautiful area, for various reasons. Though we're Scottish the family home has been in South West England for about 12 years now. And it has so many beautiful buildings, street and natural features its hardly to be believed.

​An excellent example of what people around the world think of when they imagine a 'sleepy quaint English town'. 

In an effort to actually DO something to improve the poor money situation of many comic book creators and of the art form in general, I started this petition to the UK government. 
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Please sign it and tell others about it (only British citizens or UK residents can sign...no Martians or Angels allowed! ).

"The UK has a long tradition of making good comic books. Yet since the 1980s sales of comics have declined drastically. The many talented British creators need more funding support in order to continue creating interesting comic books - we do it for opera so why not for this part of British culture?"

At 10,000 signatures, government will respond to this petition.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/257090

Rather exciting comic book news to announce folks:

Two related things: firstly, we are very pleased to say that the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has written the introduction to our new book about British history - despite all the busyness around Brexit.

The book is THE MANY NOT THE FEW by myself and Robert Brown with the GFTU (the General Federation of Trade Unions) and publisher New Internationalist.
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Secondly, as if that were not already exciting enough for us: the launch event for the book will be held next month actually IN the Houses of Parliament!

That is, we think, the first time a comic book has been launched there - so its a symbolic little victory for the art form in general.

This visual is the invitation image (with the specific details whited out, sorry), and HERE is the book:

Just been reading Howard Chaykin's excellent book 'Hey Kids! Comics!' on how comic book creators have been exploited since the 1940s and still now. So, the key question rarely brought up is - what are we going to do about this bad situation? Is there anything we can do?

In Howard's book a character in the 50s mentions that there is not much point forming a union cause the employers will just use non-union creators. So, a union would only work well if the vast majority of us comic book folk were in it, which seems very difficult to achieve. Its possible but we know that various aspects will make it very tough to get to that state.

Another option is grants - we could have a big campaign to vastly increase the amount of grants available for comics, to move into into being like opera. An art form supported by grants/the state, because its seen as being of value culturally. Thats do-able.

Some people say that if comics can’t make enough money to provide us with a decent living then why bother making comics? Shouldn’t we just not bother? Let the medium fade away. Sadly there is a pretty good case for that. But it ignores one key aspect: its the economic system we are in that creates that problem. There is nothing wrong with the art form of comics, an there is actually not a lack of readers. There is just not enough readers to make sufficient profit with a capitalist system. That is the real problem.

People often say to me something like ' but we need to concentrate on the practical stuff, we cant do anything about capitalism right now'. Obviously that's true, we do need to focus on what we can do now, in the short term, and it will take time to change the wider system.... But its not an either/or situation - the basic economic system is connected to that short term stuff. We can consider both, in tandem....the problem now is that 99% of such discussions in the comics world focus ONLY on the short term daily practical stuff, and almost completely ignore the wider economic system that causes the actual problem.... so all im trying to do is balance it up a bit by saying, lets also mention that wider stuff - at least once!

Also, if we comic book folks - and all artists - dont focus on the wider economic stuff its not like its going to magically go away. It's going to have a big effect on us no matter what - so we might as well make some small effort to effect it back.
This is my article in New Internationalist about how comics would be better off in the anarchist type system ( of the type preferred by Alan Moore it seems): https://newint.org/2017/08/16/free-comics